donderdag, oktober 30, 2008

Die Boere

This family history is being repeated by every Boer family in South Africa right now - people are again losing their ethnic identity and confused about what to call themselves - Boers, Afrikaners or whites, which are you?

They are losing their ethnic identity - and it's not the first time this tragedy is occurring.

So who are these people - first called the Grensboere, then the Voortrekkers, then Boers, then Afrikaners - and who again being degraded to "whites" - people in other words, who have no right to live on the African continent.

Many people in the news media still ridicule me whenever I write about "Boers" or "Voortrekker-descendants" on the website http://groups.msn.com/censorbugbear. But has anybody ever figured out why so many people have stopped referring to themselves as Boers since 1902 even though they know they were directly descended from Boers?

And does anybody know today why there are so many Afrikaners still refusing to admit that the Boer history even existed?

There are still some South Africans who are still referring to themselves as "Afrikaners" such as Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (PRAAG) but this number is dwindling rapidly as their identity is being taken away from them by the current regime. But refer to this group as Boers and they get angry.

And increasingly one finds this besieged minority referring to themselves in the same racist terms used by the ANC, namely "whites". so what is going on here? Many people not familiar with South African history are confused - and with right, because the history has become very muddled-up over the years.

And now, these people are again at risk of losing their ethnic identity even further - and thus also losing their rights to remain in Southern Africa as a unique, ethnically different nation.

Even those still daring to call themselves "Afrikaners" are falling victim to this identity crisis, which is being created by the ANC-regime.

How did this tragedy -- the loss of one's ethnic identity and the loss if the history of your people -- actually come about?

As soon as all these people start referring to themselves as "whites" they will have lost all rights to remain in South Africa. We know why their identity is being taken away.

But we don't know how these so-called Afrikaners have also actively participated in the steady removal of the Boer nation's identity before these current events. And that's what makes a lot of people confused about their own identity.

It's a little-known part of history which started shortly after the end of the Anglo-Boer war in 1902, when the Boers were a defeated, poverty-stricken people who had been chased off their farms and whose towns had been destroyed by the British. They were dirt-poor and plunged into an unprecedented famine. Many had to flee to the cities to survive - places which were totally alien to them, places were only English was being spoken, places where their churches were being run by people who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.

Up to that point, the Boers had had a rich history and people still find old history books referring to this nation.

Recently a kind lady from Louisiana mailed me a copy of the "History of the Boers in South Africa," written in 1887 by a Canadian missionary with no political axe to grind: namely George McCall Theal.

It contains a map showing the territories which were being farmed by the Boers: from the Olifants/Limpopo rivers in the north to below the Orange River in the South (Colesburg).

It shows the names of the towns they had started wihich carried names such as Lydenburg, ( Place of Suffering) Vryheid, ( Place of Freedom) Pietermaritzburg, (named after the famous Voortrekker leader) Pilippolis and Bethulie, (named after their beloved Bible) and Potchefstroom, Rustenburg, Winburg and Bloemfontein... as they Trekked, the Boers named the map of South Africa, and many of its vegetation and wildlife as well.

All these Boer names are now being wiped off the map of South Africa in one fell swoop by the ANC-regime -- even though the Boers' official history had ended in 1902, long before the elitist-Afrikaners who ran the secret Afrikaner Broederbond cabal had started apartheid in 1948.

Yet this is not the first time that the Boers are facing such an ethnic cleansing campaign by a nation which is hell-bent to remove their very rights to exist in South Africa - this is actually already the third time in Boer history.

The first time the British tried to eradicate them from the map of South Africa with their vicious war and their even more vicious concentration camps where many tens of thousands of Boer women, children and elderly starved to death within just a few months.

After this first genocide to target the Boer nation, their descendants still managed to cling to their identity for at least another generation - until the secret cabal of wealthy Afrikaners called the Afrikaner Broederbond gaine hegemony -- and then took away their identity from about 1933 onwards.

When the Afrikaner Broederbond 's National Party won the elections, and took over the governance of South Africa from 1948 and launched the system of apartheid, the first thing they did was to completely rewrite the Boers' history.

Suddenly, all the accomplishments of the Boers became 'Afrikaner' accomplishments.

The Boer Women's Monument in Bloemfontein, erected in memory of the murdered Boer women and children who died in the British concentration camps written about so eloquently by British pro-Boer campaigner Emily Hobhouse, even became the Afrikaner Women's Monument - a truly vile insult to their memory. The Voortrekker Monument is described in terms which honour the memory of Afrikaners -- not the Boers who had actually undertaken the Great Trek.

Paul Kruger, their last president who was so sadly exiled to the shores of a lake in Switserland, became an "Afrikaner" president in the history book -- when he himself never referred to himself in any of his correspondence as anything except a Boer.

Thus all the history books were rewritten and Boers with too-long memories such as Robert van Tonder of the Boerestaat Party and Eugene Terre'Blanche (of the incorrectly-named) Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging were persecuted publicly by the regime, aided and abetted by the Afrikaans-language news media. Eugene's heart is in the right place: he bears the flag of the old Boer Republic and he refers to himself as a Boer. But his organisation's name bears witness to his ethnic confusion, caused by the Afrikaner Broederbond's rewriting of his own history.

And now the ANC is completing this vile task which was started by the Afrikaner Broederbond, and has even changed the names of their towns - and even of the historically--important "Voortrekker" streets which indicate the routes which the old Voortrekker Leaders such as Bezuidenhout had taken while battling their way to the north to get away from British hegemony in the Cape.

The old Voortrekker Streets all over South Africa are now being renamed to Chris Hani and Nelson Mandela streets and other names of people who, unlike the old Voortrekkers, actually have contributed absolutely nothing to the development of those streets whatsoever.

Thus the ANC is proving itself to be just as fascist in its nature as the old Afrikaner Broederbond they had replaced.

Both organisations are still hell-bent to wipe out all evidence of the Boer history.

They even continue to persecute and jail anyone who wants to rekindle Boer history such as Eugene Terre'Blanche and the Boeremag-15, undergoing their hyped-up, trumped-up treason trial in Pretoria High Court.

It's no coincidence that the public prosecutor of the Boeremag-21 just happens to be a well-known former Afrikaner Broederbonder, Paul Fick, who even admitted to being a Broederbonder when I interviewed him for the Sunday Times during the apartheid-era, when his organisation had launched plans for a new flag and wanted to test public opinion...

And if Robert van Tonder, riddled with cancer and suffering terribly, hadn't committed suicide a few years ago, they would have also had him in jail by now under trumped-up charges.

He and other Boers still proudly spoke the Taal, the language of their forebears - the language which now is being wiped off the map of South Africa.

Today, people no longer know who these Boers were - nobody knows about those dirt-poor Boer women who founded the garment workers' union, those famished women who had left their beloved farms and had gone to the cities to try and survive after their defeat in 1902.

Women like Johanna and Hester Cornelius of Thabazimbi, who even wrote their own plays, describing the Boers' history in the cities, those many thousands of women and girls who had marched behind the Red Flag of the communist party in the cities of South Africa.

And the Boer men who founded the Mineworkers union (now named Solidarity), and who had fought so valiantly against the mine magnates during the mineworkers' uprisings at the Witwatersrand and of whom thousands had been shot dead by their own compatriot soldiers from the countryside, who had been told by the government of Jan Smuts that these men were the enemies, the "communists". They were shooting their own Boer kindred and didn't know it...

Nobody knows the history of these Boer people today because the Afrikaner Broederbond has deliberately written these facts from their history books.

History researcher Elsabe Brink wrote brilliantly about these defeated Boers in the cities of South Africa who put up such a valiant fight for their own identity - and whose ethnic identity is now again being discarded today in the latest ethnic cleansing facing them.

The elitist Afrikaners of the Cape, who had been ashamed of the Boers to the north who had fought against the British, were equally ashamed of these poor, defeated Boers who were trying to survive in the cities -- forced to work in mines and factories "like black girls in the factories" as they referred to them.

Hand-labour was as abhorrent to these elitist Afrikaners as it is to this day. That's why Orania is so newsworthy: because these Afrikaners are actually doing all their own labour...

The old Boer mineworkers were equally despised - they and their families were referred to as the "new poor-white problem" in a Red Cross report published about the devastating poverty among the descendants of the Boers in 1923.

But these weren't "whites" -- these were all Boers. I recorded many of the names of the mineworkers in the Witwatersrand towns like Springs and Vrededorp who had been shot in the Cottlesloe uprising by Jan Smuts' troops - and they were carrying Boer names.

I also have a record of all the Boer children of Langlaagte and other Afrikaner-run orphanages who were adopted by wealthier English-speakers over those years -- and thus were lost to the Boer nation forever.

These adoptions went on until well into the early 1970s and I know many people today with English surnames who were raised as Englishmen yet do not know that they are descended from Boer families.

And again we find these Boers back today - again growing increasingly poor and again fighting for their survival and their ethnic identities in internal refugee camps, and again giving up their children for adoption to wealthier elites.

These internal refugee camps for Boers are now run by organisations such as "Afrikaner Charity."

Yet this is also the very same group who still refers to themselves as Boers to this day. Just go and talk to them and ask them about their history. They know who they are descended from.

So please don't refer to these dirt-poor working-class people, who refuse to be defeated and who refuse to forget their own history, merely as "whites.'